LOS ANGELES – Los Angeles police arrested a man suspected of using a sledgehammer to destroy Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, officials said Thursday.
Jamie Otis was taken into custody early Thursday on suspicion of felony vandalism, Officer Andrew Chambers said. It wasn’t immediately known if he has an attorney.
Otis told several media outlets after Wednesday’s pre-dawn attack that he originally intended to remove the star. He said he wanted to auction it off to raise funds for the 11 women accusing the presidential candidate of groping them. Trump has denied the groping allegations.
The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which bestows the stars and maintains the popular tourist attraction, said it would take several days to repair Trump’s spot.
BERLIN – Southern Spain will become desert and deciduous forests will vanish from much of the Mediterranean basin unless global warming is reined in sharply, according to a study released Thursday.
Researchers used historical data and computer models to forecast the likely impact of climate change on the Mediterranean region, based on the targets for limiting global warming 195 countries agreed to during a summit in France last year.
“The Paris Agreement says it’s necessary to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), if possible 1.5 degrees,” Joel Guiot, a researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research in France who co-wrote the study, said. “That doesn’t seem much to people, but we wanted to see what the difference would be on a sensitive region like the Mediterranean.”
ISLAMABAD – Pakistan and India on Thursday each expelled a diplomat from the other country in an exchange amid escalating tensions between the two South Asian archrivals over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.
India announced earlier in the day that it expelled a staffer at the Pakistani Embassy in New Delhi after briefly detaining him for espionage activities.
Islamabad said the allegations against its diplomat, Mahmood Akhtar, were “false and unsubstantiated.” Akhtar was told he had to leave New Delhi by Saturday.
Ravinder Yadav, a New Delhi police official, said Akhtar, who worked at the visa section of the embassy, was found in possession of documents on the Indian troops deployed along the India-Pakistan border.
Associated Press
